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WEST QUODDY HEAD MAINE ORNAMENT |
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Maine’s West Quoddy Head lighthouse, also known at West Quoddy Light, stands on the easternmost point of the continental United States, and as such is the easternmost lighthouse beacon in the United States. Its red and white bands with its blue lamphouse denote that it stands on the American side of the Lubec Channel, whereas East Quoddy Head is on the Canadian side. A 1/3 size replica of the West Quoddy Light also stands on the shore of Lake Havasu, Arizona. |
West Quoddy Head Lighthouse:
The Light at the “End of the World”
Built in 1858, the current West Quoddy Head Lighthouse is the third lighthouse to serve the location, the first lasting from 1808-1831 and the second lasting from 1831-1858. The lighthouse is 49 feet tall and stands on a 40-foot cliff, which gives the light a height of 89 feet above sea level (with a focal point at 83 feet above sea level). The West Quoddy Head Lighthouse still uses its third order Fresnel lens, and has a non-rotating flash that runs 24 hours a day and whose unique flashing sequence is 2 seconds on, 2 seconds off, 2 seconds on, 9 seconds off. The light is visible 15 to 18 miles out to sea. A foghorn compliments the light with a unique signal that consists of a 2-second blast, 2 seconds silence, another 2-second blast, and 24 seconds silence. Its current day markings are fifteen red and white horizontal bands. (Does it run 24 hours or sunset to sunrise?)
Introduction
The Easternmost Point in the 48 Adjacent United States of America has the irony of being named West Quoddy Head. West Quoddy Head stands on a small, leaf-shaped peninsula that juts out of the mainland, most of which is now Quoddy Head State Park. The word “Quoddy” refers to the Passamaquoddy Indian Nation, who had been native to the area prior to European conquest. The West Quoddy Head Lighthouse, with its fifteen red and white horizontal stripes, stands on this Easternmost Point of Mainland. The closest incorporated village is Lubec, Maine (population 1,652). Lubec is situated on another peninsula the lies 3.25 miles to the northwest by water (10 miles by road), and has the distinction of being the Easternmost Town in the United States.
“The End of the World”—Assuming America is the World…
Locals in the area often refer to West Quoddy Head as “The End of the World” because it is the farthest east the United States mainland reaches. Americans may think of Maine as the northeast corner of the world, and political maps of the United States seem to make this out to be the case. However, a closer look at the terrain around West Quoddy Head show that it is anything but the end of the world. The landmass to the northwest of the lighthouse is Campobello Island, which belongs to New Brunswick. Campobello Island is home to Head Harbour Lighthouse, which is also known as East Quoddy Head Lighthouse and is painted with a red cross with a white background to signify that it is in Canadian territory. Visible across the water to the east of West Quoddy Head is Grand Manan Island and the neighboring White Head Islands, which also belong to New Brunswick. Continue eastward across the Bay of Fundy, and you will reach Nova Scotia.
The reason the “end of the world” is surrounded by so much land has to do with the United States’ position as a brand new country in bargaining with England regarding territory lines in the Northeast in the early Nineteenth Century. The United States, being the weaker country at the time, was in somewhat less of a position to bargain, but were determined to hold their own, to which Britain responded with something along the lines of, “OK, you can have that area, but not an island more! And we’re holding on to the sea rights around Maine, by the way…” In fact, the Red and White Stripes painted on the West Quoddy Head Lighthouse are more than just a decoration; they are also a statement from a determined young country staking out their territory in the face of the mother country they had just gained independence from.
“The End of the World” Needs a Lighthouse
Although the West Quoddy Head Lighthouse is an American territorial statement, it was also a territorial statement to another group of people that caused an internal threat to the nascent country, and that group was smugglers. The small United States Government did not yet require an income tax, but it had to collect money to function, and one of its areas of revenue was from tariffs on imports. With West Quoddy Head being so far on the outer reaches of the new nation’s borders, it was a favorite place for smugglers to bring in goods off the radar from the U.S. Revenue Marine (later to become the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service), the pre-Coast Guard agency that policed the waters around the United States for smugglers.
Yet another problem was Sail Rock, a small land formation that protrudes from the water just to the east of West Quoddy Head (and which makes Sail Rock the Real Easternmost Point of the Lower 48’s). The small stretch of coast around West Quoddy Head also hides numerous underwater crags, which lie in wait to tear apart unsuspecting ships that come too close to the shoreline. According to one 19th century lighthouse keeper, the sum total of these ship hazards took approximately a ship a year, and occasionally cost lives as well.
These concerns caused six prominent citizens in the area to petition then president Thomas Jefferson in 1806 to put a lighthouse in the area. The U.S. Government responded quickly, and on February 10, 1807, Congress passed a law authorizing what would be the First West Quoddy Head Lighthouse.
Two Cheap Lighthouses
The Lighthouse Bill of 1789 required that when lighthouses were built, the land the lighthouse would stand on and the land immediately surrounding the lighthouse must be ceded to the United States, so in 1807, the State of Massachusetts (which Maine was a part of at the time) ceded 100 acres on West Quoddy Head to the Federal Government to build the West Quoddy Head Lighthouse. The building was finished in 1808, and would be the first of three lighthouses to illuminate the area. Contractors Benjamin Beal and Duncan W. Thaxter were enlisted to build the first West Quoddy Head Lighthouse and its accompanying keepers’ quarters. The lighthouse was a wooden octagonal tower and was painted white. The keepers’ quarters was a 17’ x 26’ house split into three rooms: a parlor, a kitchen, and a bedroom.
As with many of America’s early lighthouses, the building did not hold up well, and in March 1830, a mere 12 years after it had been built, Congress authorized the building of a replacement lighthouse. The building of the second West Quoddy Head Lighthouse was contracted out to Joseph Berry, built of rubblestone over the course of 1830-1831, and lit on August 1, 1831. Like its predecessor, the second lighthouse was also painted white. The lighthouse was fitted with 10 Lewis lamps, which the U.S. Lighthouse Service was using in all of its lighthouses at the time. This lighthouse had a focal plane of 90 feet above sea level, and was visible 17-21 miles out to sea in clear weather.
The Current Lighthouse: Third Time’s a Charm
Another ten years passed, and by then both the new lighthouse and the 1808 keepers’ quarters were falling apart. Reportedly, the rubblestone in the lighthouse was laid so poorly that the inside of the tower would be coated with ice from the leaking of water in the wintertime, and the house was leaking badly as well. The sorry condition of the second West Quoddy Head Lighthouse was unfortunately very typical of American lighthouses at the time, and this was only confirmed when Congress conducted an investigation of the U.S. lighthouse system in 1851. The five-member panel who conducted the investigation returned with a 700-page report that stated officially what mariners had been saying for years: that the American lighthouse system was cheap, inadequate and unreliable, and was consequently costing lives and ships unnecessarily and making America look pathetic in the eyes of other nations. The United States government got the message, and did an about face in their lighthouse building agenda. Instead of building lighthouses for cheap as they had before, they would opt for high quality, sturdy lighthouses that were well engineered and would be designed to last for centuries to come. So one by one, the U.S. Lighthouse Service began replacing their cheap, ramshackle lighthouses with expensive, here-to-stay lighthouses.
West Quoddy Head’s turn for an upgrade came in August 16, 1856, when Congress authorized the third (and current) West Quoddy Head Lighthouse. The current West Quoddy Head Lighthouse was designed and built by The Army Crops of Engineers. The lighthouse building was made of brick, and was built 25 feet to the west of the second light tower on a level that would be more visible at sea. Construction of the lighthouse began in 1857 and was completed in 1858, and a new keepers’ quarters and a boilerhouse were built concurrently with the lighthouse. A third order Fresnel lens was installed in light tower when the building was constructed. The finished West Quoddy Head Lighthouse was lit on August 14, 1858, and, with some minor exceptions, the lighthouse has remained lit ever since, and even still uses its original third order Fresnel lens.
The Eleven Fog Signals of the West Quoddy Head Lighthouse
But having a lighthouse on West Quoddy Head was only helpful about half the time. The native environment is one where frigid air often meets relatively warmer waters. This collision of temperatures produces thick, heavy fog, which often shrouds West Quoddy Head for days at a time. The fog is so persistent that it is typical for West Quoddy Head to have fog for one hundred days out of a year.
Finding a fog signal that worked properly for the area turned out to be more troublesome than keeping a sturdy lighthouse. From 1808 to 1820 the West Quoddy Head Lighthouse dealt with the fog via the use of a cannon. The ship that made the most trips past the lighthouse at the time was a ferry that went from Maine to St. John, New Brunswick. It would sound its whistle if it came by in the fog, and if the light keeper could hear the whistle, he would fire the cannon repeatedly as the ferry passed by.
In May of 1820, Congress approved of the addition of a fog bell on the lighthouse grounds, which were added later that year. However, without the modern science to aid them, the Lighthouse Service found themselves searching the most effective fog signal mechanism through trial and error.
Between 1820 and 1838, West Quoddy Head had been through four different fog bells, which were:
- A 500 lb. bell,
- A 241 lb. bell with a higher-pitched ring,
- A gigantic 1,545 lb. bell, and
- A 14 ½-foot long steel triangle, which was essentially a large version of the marching band instrument or an old-fashioned dinner bell.
All four of these bells were hand rung, and were not only relatively inadequate to break through the fog, they kept the light keeper occupied enough that in 1826, Congress authorized a raise for the West Quoddy Head Lighthouse keeper to reimburse him for the trouble of tending both the bell and the lighthouse, and included back pay for the previous years of tolling the fog bell.
The concern with the state of the West Quoddy Head Lighthouse, especially regarding the fog signal, was such that in 1838, Congress approved the transferal of the fog signal and the building of a lighthouse on Sail Rock, the main ship hazard that the West Quoddy Head Light Station was built to warn against. Although this was authorized, the Lighthouse Service never went through with the building of a light station on Sail Rock. However, in 1838, they did replace the big triangle “dinner bell” with a 1,000-pound mechanically rung bell that they hoped would remedy the problem. This bell could be rung by hand or by machine, but apparently the hammer apparatus that rang the bell mechanically did not work well, and therefore the bell could not be heard unless it was rung by hand.
In 1852, a Jones fog bell and its corresponding tower replaced this mechanical bell. In fact, one of the earliest photos of West Quoddy Head Lighthouse features the Jones fog bell tower in the photograph. A Jones fog bell featured a bell atop a platform that rang automatically with the assistance of hanging weights. The entire system worked in the same way a grandfather clock does, with descending weights that would trip hammers to ring the bell as they fell. These weights would then be cranked back to the top once they had reached the ground.
In the 1860’s, the air horn had developed well enough that the Lighthouse Service decided to switch from bell systems to air horns. The first was a hot air trumpet that was installed in 1866, but would only be in use for three years. The Lighthouse Service replaced the air trumpet with a locomotive steam whistle in 1869. This ninth attempt at a fog signal had the most staying power of any of the signals that went before it, as the steam whistle served West Quoddy Head for nearly forty years. In fact, the next improvement came not with the signal itself, but with the boiler room which provided the steam that powered it. The boilerhouse was enlarged in 1887 from its original size of 14’ x 26’ to the 26’ x 32’ building that it is today.
Experience West Quoddy Head Lighthouse:
Short “moving portrait”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX2tyyaVzHw
Another view of the lighthouse:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBdmpnrtVyQ
Longer walk on the grounds with close look at the lighthouse:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diwQxl9rb5k
Short circa 1950-1952 film clip of inside the lamphouse with then-current keeper and the Fresnel lens:
http://lighthouse.cc/westquoddy/keeper.avi
